Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Politics: Do these chains make me look fat?

Les Jones has a post up about the rising tide of refugees fleeing taxation and/or regulation in California. It's true that some folks will move if the regulatory environment where they live becomes too stifling for them; it's the other kind you have to worry about. Just ask the residents of Colorado or Oregon, they'll tell you all about it. The refugees to worry about are the ones who say "Ooh, everything is so crowded and dirty and icky and taxes are so high and everything costs so much and there's so many Mexicans!" and leave for Boise or Eugene or Boulder or Prescott, and build a home in a little subdivision, and demand more parks and security cameras in the schools and why don't we have more water for the sprinklers in my lawn? and let's hire more police officers so they can arrest people who speed in our subdivision and we better picket that gun store downtown because the children can't be exposed to guns and we need bilingual streetsigns so as not to be discriminatory and surely raising property taxes just a little to raise money for a performing arts center would be good...

...and wonder why their new home rapidly turns into the same festering cesspit they just crawled out of.

Some folks may be leaving California looking for freedom, but these guys are just leaving to find more comfortable chains that don't make them look fat.

9 comments:

I understand the psychology of newcomers wanting to drag their smelly baggage along with them; what I don't grasp is why the existing residents don't take the new folks aside and 'splain how things work in the new place. Kind of like a Reality-Based Welcome Wagon.

Because people who think that they alter the nature of reality through desire for it to be "Just so" will not be swayed by anything less than a metaphorical Reality Baseball Bat, and maybe not even then. If some earth-shattering event doesn't shift their Paradigm Of Ridiculousness, they'll just giggle at the silly logic people and carry on.

Fortunately for a lot of you free-staters, it's people like me making the trek out, and its your dregs making the trek in. I have no desire to change a place I get to...unless it doesn't have a good bar and a gun shop close by, but then I wouldn't move there in the first place.

The refugees pathology. Not just Californians, but all the others, recently Muslims very much in the news. Leave the hole they were stuck in, go somewhere else, and re-create the same hole.There's a nice doctoral theses in this.

Things were pretty simple out on the old farm or ranch. Hand dug wells, outhouses, and grass-fueled transportation. Neighbors would gather and help build someone's barn. If that someone took up a life of crime, he'd get hung from the new barn's rafters.

Sometime or another developers came in and started improving everything. More jobs, a stronger tax base, better roads, safer streets, public health and better schools--that's what they promised.

Can't go back--the law will not let us. Zoning, high property taxes, regulations: we're all city folk now. We've been annexed.